Sorry for the late notice, folks, but we're going to postpone our showing of "Czech Dream" due to the snow delay and transportation issues. Our film series will resume next week with Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping! We'll try to work "Czech Dream" into the line-up for the New Year. Stay tuned for a list of films coming up in January!

Rainbow Town is the portrait of an orphanage in Liberia that provides a home, family and hope to hundreds of children whose parents were killed by the war. Maker Lauren Selmon Roberts and her collaborators spent over six months filming this inspiring doc. A gorgeous story about how faith can cultivate community and creativity in the midst of wreckage. See more about the film here at http://rainbowtown.org/movie. Makers will be present.

"The Garden" is an academy award nominated documentary about the fight for a community in south central Los Angeles to keep its lush 14 acre urban farm. The garden fed and nourished 3 generations until a tangle of legal challenges and neighborhood conflicts brought in the bulldozers that destroyed this paradise. Scott Hamilton Kennedy's fascinating film follows the story of how the garden provided a way to self-reliance for one community, and about the differences that ensued between Mexican American and African American local residents over their visions for the neighborhood.

This Black Soil (2004, 58 min. documentary). This film, over 10 years in the making. chronicles the successful struggle of the people of Bayview, Virginia, a small and impoverished rural African-American community, in following a new vision of prosperity. Catalyzed by the defeat of a state plan to build a prison in their backyard, the powerful women leaders and residents created a non-profit organization, secured $10 million in grants, purchased the proposed prison site land and are now building a new community from the ground up.

On Sunday November 7, the Big Muddy presents "The Sleep Dealer," a thriller by director Alex Rivera that follows the connections between the privatization and agglomeration of water by corporations and the pressures this puts on farmers in the rural south to leave their homes and become part of the low-paying labor market at the international border with the US.

Join us at a soft opening of the Big muddy IMC and social space with a screening of the classic documentary The Atomic Cafe. Scary 'nuff for Halloween!! Zombie capitalism! Zombie military industrial complex! Friday Oct. 29, 7 pm. Always free. Calendars for the season will be available. Even if you can't stay for the movie, drop in and say hi!

The Senator Paul Simon Federal Building in Carbondale, IL has installed a large solar electric system on the roof of their building.

The new system consists of 3 separate arrays with 33 strings of 15 photovoltaic modules each for a total of 495 modules. The total rated capacity of this system is 101,475 watts of DC power, making it the largest system in the Southern Illinois region.

MARION, IL — Chicago-area activist Rob Sherman and Marion resident Robert Donelson were met by reporters and several dozen protesters earlier today at a press conference at Marion's Tower Square. This press conference was held in response to plans by the City of Marion to erect a Ten Commandments monument.

Marion resident Ken Kessler proposed the idea of a Ten Commandments monument to the Marion City Council at a meeting on Monday. This monument would be funded by private donors but located on city property at Tower Square in Marion. Sherman, an atheist activist from the Chicago area, spoke at Monday's Council meeting in opposition to the monument.